Over the past decade, the Internet has become a source of a vast amount of information. Unfortunately, there is no agreed method of indexing or categorisation, so that it is very difficult to identify and locate most of the information which may be relevant to a particular query. Two of the most common ways of locating relevant information on the Internet are to locate a URL in a printed publication or television advertisement and to enter it into a web browser to “visit” the URL and obtain the desired information, or to use one of the many Internet search engines.
The Internet search engines typically maintain indices based on key words which appear on web pages. When some key words are typed into a search engine, the search engine produces a list of hypertext links to documents having those key words. This is a good way of finding some general information on a particular subject, but it is not an effective way of finding all relevant information.
There are advantages and disadvantages to doing business on the Internet. One advantage is that the Internet provides rapid and inexpensive access to an enormous number of different potential customers. This is particularly useful when a business involves selling items such as books or CDs, which have universal appeal and are non-perishable and relatively inexpensive to ship to anywhere in the world. A disadvantage is that the Internet is less suitable for businesses which have a more local customer base, because it does not provide easy ways of targeting local customers. Similarly, many customers have difficulty in identifying Internet businesses are within their geographical location. For example, a pizza shop might have a customer base located exclusively within a 5 km radius, but an Internet search on “pizza shops” might bring up thousands of such shops from all round the world, so that shops in the relevant geographical location are lost amongst the large number of irrelevant ones.
Indeed, the majority of businesses and organizations have a geographically defined constituency, and are not therefore inherently suited to the presently available Internet search engines. Some search engines such as Altavista allow a search to be confined to a particular country, and Yahoo goes further, allowing a search to be restricted according to country, state and city. However, in many cases, a restriction to a particular city is still not enough. In the case of a pizza shop, a list of all pizza shops in a particular city would still contain far too many shops which were not within a 5 km radius of the potential customer.
One way for a person to attempt to overcome this problem when using an Internet search engine is to use the locality of the particular business as a key word. Thus, the person might type “Pizza Shop Preston” into the search engine. However, this is still unsatisfactory because all relevant pizza shops may not have used the locality name “Preston” as a key word on their Internet web sites, and relevant shops in neighbouring locations will not be located. Further, there may be multiple localities throughout the world with the same locality name. For example, there are approximately thirty eight localities which have the name “Preston” in the United States.
An attempt has been made to address this problem in U.S. Pat. No. 5,930,474, which relates to an Internet organiser for accessing geographically and topically based information. The organiser disclosed in that patent essentially requires the breaking down of a city into various localities, and the compilation of “locality guides” for the localities, with each business being listed in a particular locality guide. This is useful to some extent, in a similar manner to a neighbourhood telephone directory. However, it still has numerous shortcomings. It fails to distinguish between different types of goods and services for which different locality sizes are appropriate. For example, a person may only be prepared to travel up to 2 km to do the daily grocery shopping, but may be prepared to travel up to 20 km to purchase an item of furniture. A builder of a major project might be happy to have pre-mixed concrete delivered within a maximum of 20 km due to the perishable nature of the product. On the other hand prefabricated steelwork can be transported hundreds of kilometres without deterioration and without a major cost disadvantage. Further, a business classified as being just within the borders of a particular locality may by that classification miss out on business which it might otherwise have gained from a nearby customer who is classified as residing just within the border of an adjoining locality.
An object of the present invention is to overcome of alleviate one or more of the problems present in the prior art.